Bloody hell! When ScoMo lost a political knife fight

When he was head of Tourism Australia, Prime Minister Scott Morrison kept a photo of then Prime Minister John Howard in his Sydney office – and referred to his mentor as "the boss".

He also had a direct line to Howard, which he used in 2006 to give him a private advance viewing of the controversial $180 million "So Where the Bloody Hell are You?" advertising campaign, featuring a bikini-clad unknown 18-year-old, Lara Bingle.

But such enviable access couldn't save his skin.

Lara Bingle in the So Where the Bloody Hell Are You advertisement which sparked an international media storm. Tourism Australia

A few months after the launch of the cheeky campaign, which was temporarily banned in the United Kingdom and sparked an international media storm, Morrison was sacked from his $350,000-a-year job, just over halfway through his three-year contract, with insiders insisting it was on the instruction of then federal tourism minister, Fran Bailey.

Former Nationals leader, deputy prime minister and then Chair of Tourism Australia, Tim Fischer, had to break it to him and handle Morrison's exit, with one Tourism Australia manager at the time describing his boss's reaction as complete surprise: "He was gutted. He'd been doing a great job, however, a lot of us could see it coming as relations between Scott and Fran Bailey had deteriorated over a range of issues. But Scott didn't seem to see it, and he was absolutely gutted."

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Discussing it publicly for the first time, Fischer told AFR Weekend that with hindsight, Mr Morrison was "wrongly, perhaps" removed from the role.

"They were electrifying times at Tourism Australia with a strong minister and a strong CEO," Fischer said, speaking from his home at Mudgegonga in northern Victoria.

"Scott was full of energy and he led us from the board room out on wild escapades to places like West Tasmania and around Nilgiri Reef on the coast of Western Australia, where he almost drowned me.

"Scott deserves full credit for the 'So, Where the Bloody Hell are You' campaign. It took some courage to run that campaign and he saw it through.

Lara Bingle in the So Where the Bloody Hell Are You advertisement which sparked an international media storm. Tourism Australia

"He was let go, wrongly perhaps."

Also breaking a 12-year silence on the topic, the long retired Fran Bailey told AFR Weekend "I don't see the point in raking over it: it was a unanimous decision by the board at the time, and by me as Minister. There's been a bit of mystery surrounding it over the years, but all I'll say is sometimes things work out in an organisation, and sometimes they don't. In this case, Scott Morrison didn't work out.

"I'm sure he's learned how to work with people better these days. His career has certainly had a few twists and turns."

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She too applauded the campaign she signed off on, still expressing pride in it as she pointed out "it added $4.2 billion to the industry's bottom line after just 12 months. Thanks to the exception the British took to it, we got more free publicity out of it than we ever could have afforded to buy."

Scott Morrison when he was managing director of Tourism Australia. 2004

Morrison had brought in the Sydney office of M&C Saatchi London to create the ad - the same agency that did the acclaimed "100 Per Cent Pure New Zealand" campaign when he was director of NZ's Office of Tourism and Sport.

The UK initially banned "So Where the Bloody Hell are You", a decision later overturned. In a well-executed publicity stunt, Bailey and Bingle flew to London to protest the ban. The ad was also banned in Canada, while Singapore ran a version that read: "So Where Are You?"

At the time, media reports and industry gossip circulated that Morrison and Bailey had never got along, and that the relationship deteriorated further around the time the campaign came out.

"Scott couldn't hide his contempt for Fran," former Labor minister Martin Ferguson told AFR Weekend. "He got sick and tired of her demands on the organisation. I was shadow minister for tourism at the time, and I rang Scott as soon as I heard the news to say how upset I was as I'd heard only good things about him from the industry; Scott was tremendously disappointed at the time.

Former Nationals leader, deputy PM and then Chair of Tourism Australia, Tim Fischer, says that with hindsight, Mr Morrison was "wrongly, perhaps" removed from the role. Marina Neil

"Even though he was close to John Howard, Howard wasn't going to come in over the top of one of his ministers to save him."

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It might have hurt like hell. And yet his public service sacking diverted him onto the parliamentary path. Morrison spent a few months licking his wounds, consulting, and getting fit by kayaking around picturesque Lilli Pilli in Sydney's south. He then ran for and won Bruce Baird's old seat in the Division of Cook.

"Scott should not have lost his job at TA; the entire industry was set back significantly by the antics of Fran and the Liberal party," Ferguson says. "But the real irony is that his sacking turned out to be the making of his political career."

Back in 2006, Morrison was on a TA roadshow in regional Victoria when the call came that he had to return to Sydney immediately. "It wasn't completely brutal," the TA insider says. "They sorted out a good departure package for him and off he marched. It was all typical Scott. He took it on the chin. He's a fighter and fighters create controversy. He put it behind him and looked to the next opportunity."

The Asia Pacific managing director of high-end travel agency Virtuoso, Michael Londregan, who was TA's country manager in the United States at the time, says: "Most of us thought it was wrong Scott didn't get to serve his full tenure and show what he could do," adding he was a great leader and fair about granting pay rises "so long as you'd met your KPIs".

When Morrison became managing director of TA, Londregan and others were in the process of finessing the G'day LA concept. Keith Urban and Nicole Kidman can thank Morrison given they met at G'Day LA in 2005.

"We were all nervous Scott would kill it given it wasn't his idea – but he got the concept immediately and totally backed us."

Now in its 15th year, G'Day LA is still going strong. As for "So Where the Bloody Hell are You", it might have inadvertently played a small role in the making of the nation's 30th prime minister, yet when Labor won power in 2007 and Ferguson became tourism minister, he quashed it. "To be honest, I had to bury that campaign as soon as I came in," he says. "I never liked the ad and it did us a lot of damage in Asia, where it was seen as culturally insensitive."

It's enough to prompt Australian tax payers to ask, what the bloody hell was all the fuss about?

An image from Tourism Australia's ad that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation refused to run during family television programming because of the word "hell". AAPIMAGE

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